


I have slain the man/that sought my heart's blood

by Sleepycreek23



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-16 04:01:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28824894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sleepycreek23/pseuds/Sleepycreek23
Summary: “You’ve come this far to kill me then?” Nicolo taunted, not yet willing to cede any good will to what was surely a foot soldier of the devil. A mirror of his own curse or perhaps the source of it. How many times he had risen with his intestines still falling in loops about his waist, just to sink his blade further into Nicolo’s neck, to squeeze his hands a little tighter around his throat, to kill him first?No, distance did not cure this too intimate knowledge.OR, how it all began. Also, chronicling the greatest love story through horses and travel.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	1. Chapter 1

“I have slain the man that sought  
my heart’s blood many a time  
riding a noble mare who’s  
back none else may climb  
the desert knows me well, the night,  
the mounted men, as do the sword,  
the spear, and the pen.”  
-Al-Mutanabi

Nicolo fled Jerusalem on the back of a grey stallion, stolen from the streets of the fallen city, his master’s blood drying on his flanks. He was the desert breed, with a small, dished face and a strength and speed belying his small stature. Nicolo remembered leaning over his neck, fingers tangled in hair and reins, watching as the man he had already killed a dozen times over rose up again, stumbling to his feet, his eyes wide and harsh in his gaunt face.

It was later that the stallion’s ears had flickered in the darkness, he had heard the man coming before Nicolo had--too concerned with getting himself warm by the sputtering, measly fire he had been able to coax out of dried pine needles, branches and the edges of his tunic. He had fled to the mountains outside of Jerusalem. Towards something green. Something large enough he could disappear into.

“Who’s there?”

He stood up with his sword drawn, peering into the night. Unwilling to be killed and then have to come back to life and start the fire anew.

“Peace.”

It was the specter from the battlefields, his turban loose and falling about his ears, beard still flecked with ashes from the fires that had consumed everything. Nicolo did not know the word, he had spent precious little time trying to learn the local’s language--why expend effort to understand their curses, the screams and begging?

But he did understand the hands spread wide, the look of flat out exhaustion and the effort it must have taken for him to follow him all this way and find him here, nestled against a crumbling hillside sheltered by tall pine trees. Behind him, looking equally exhausted was a skinny horse lacquered with sweat, it’s tack ragged and blood stained. Another refugee of Jerusalem?

The tip of his sword dropped and he hesitated. “You’ve come this far to kill me then?” Nicolo taunted, not yet willing to cede any good will to what was surely a foot soldier of the devil. A mirror of his own curse or perhaps the source of it. How many times he had risen with his intestines still falling in loops about his waist, just to sink his blade further into Nicolo’s neck, to squeeze his hands a little tighter around his throat, to kill him first?

No, distance did not cure this too intimate knowledge.

Yusuf’s hands fell a little too, with the realization of how much ground there was yet to cover. As if he could have thought differently. Someone so bloodthirsty, who would travel leagues to slaughter, to steal and plunder from those who had never raised a hand against them? It would take more than a gesture of good will to show this man what peace looked liked.

The Frankish invader did not waiver, his body was a taut line all the way to the tip of his sword which was pointed to the ground, but from experience Yusuf knew how quickly it could be swept up, lashing out against arms, legs, an undefended torso. There was no help for it. No amount of words that he likely couldn’t understand or placating hand gestures would convince him that he wasn’t here to continue the war.

He dropped his hands quickly and went for his own sword, pulling it from the sheathe at his hip and dropping it to the ground.

Nicolo’s sword wavered in the air, brought up, nearly over his shoulder for a full and forceful downwards sweep, but it hung there, as the man’s eyes, bright in the fire’s light, took in the gesture that bridged their lack of shared language, the bloodshed, and the horror of the last few weeks of their shared lives and deaths.

It was enough.

Gently, he lowered his own sword and it met the ground with a soft thud. And suddenly, they were just men.

It did not come easily, to leave their weapons there, and look on each other without iron between them. In every way, they were still the embodiment of the others misery, his departure from the known world, the known course of life. In Nicolo's face, Yusuf saw the needless deaths of good men, of women that sold him fruit in the marketplace and the children that darted between the stalls, laughing, bright; before they were made into gaunt, half-living things that lined the blown apart streets and begged for a piece of bread, for anything. And he felt like a traitor to every one of his people when he turned his back and grabbed for the reins of his horse, to tie him next to the invader's horse on the same small tree.

But what else was there? He could pour pints of his blood into the sand and never bring back a one of them.

Nicolo watched as his figure, half lit in the dark, worked a quick knot, not so different from his own and the skinny horse dropped his head next to his own to crop at the thin grass. He was still waiting. He felt like an unplucked string, waiting for the striking hand, the burning cut of that curved blade, anything, _anything_ to dispel this latest unreality. To him, the man was shaped like hell.

He was all the faces of every person that was not a Christian, that spoke an unintelligible language, that dressed differently, that had killed him, that he had killed, and that he still failed to understand, why he had come to kill.

There were the familiar sounds of a horse being untacked, the thud of a saddle into the dirt, the horse shaking its self bodily. Yusuf came out of the dark with a bedroll under his arm and a challenge on his face. _Don't fuck with me._ It clearly said and also, _Don't make me regret this._


	2. Chapter 2

That night in the foothills of Jerusalem was the beginning of an uneasy truce. There was no bloodshed, but hardly any sleep either. Morning came weakly, as if hesitant to shine it's light on the day and the city smoking below them.

They began to pack before the sun could complete its rise over the hill. There were the twin surprises of not being murdered by one another at any point during the night and that no one else had come to murder or threaten them. Any able soldier was probably drunk on the spoils of conquest, thought Nicolo dryly. It wouldn't be long before men started to boil over from the city, like so many ants crawling out of a nest, sure to consume everything in their path.

Nicolo rose unsteadily, shaking the dirt from the cloak that he'd slept on. The coals of his fire smoked weakly and he watched as Yusuf gulped water from a leather canteen, his thin face dragged down by bruises under his eyes that even their healing couldn't dismiss.

Their horses stood where they had left them, a few strips of bark missing off the tree where they had turned their hunger after eating all the grass within reach. His own horse had only a little more flesh compared to the other man's. The dried blood streaked down his flanks looked garish in the light, like the painted blood on a cross in church on Sunday morning. He turned from the sight abruptly, swallowing bile.

There was hardly anything to pack. Hardly anything that could be said or understood. And without saying anything, Yusuf kicked dirt over the fire and walked towards his mount under the pine tree. He spoke to her softly, his hands slipping over her neck. They seemed to be words of comfort. The first Nicolo had ever heard out of his mouth. A ragged blanket was thrown over her back and then a saddle followed. The tightening of a girth. Nicolo could see where she had once been a pretty mare, but now her black coat was faded, she twitched flies off her bony sides, and flicked her tail over sunken hips. He watched from a distance as the Muslim soldier set one foot in the stirrups and in one fluid motion, settled himself in the saddle, picked up the reins and clucked the mare into a brisk trot, putting the city and Nicolo at his back.

And what else was there to do but follow?

*

It wasn't long into their travels before Yusuf began trying to find a common tongue for them. His days as a merchant's son had given him a smattering of languages, some of which he was more proficient in than in others and he tried all of them on the Frankish invader. Some days, his anger was so great, that he seethed at him in any that he could, telling Nicolo that he was a pale skinned murderer, that he and his kind were responsible for innumerable atrocities. And on other days, a type of strange guilt set upon him and he tried to talk to him like a man instead of a monster.

Mostly, Nicolo rode behind in silence, without the satisfaction of a retort or any indication to what language he understood. Could he not at least give him that, so that he knew better how to insult him?

One day, weeks into distancing themselves from the war and all that had came with it, they were resting in the shade of a few scraggly trees, trying to wait out the worst of the afternoon heat. Yusuf had passed over a waxed linen bag full of dried meat and said, "Would you like some?" In Greek. This had earned him a polite nod and Nicolo reaching out, pulling a few pieces from the bag and wordlessly chewing them. It did not illuminate rather the filthy man knew Greek. Kind or cruel, loud or soft, he seemed mostly immune to the talking. It seemed like it would take more than just words to pull him out of whatever world he inhabited behind those pale eyes.

At some point and Nicolo was not really sure when, Yusuf began to recite a little poetry at night. Of course, his grasp of Arabic was almost non-existent beyond the necessary functions of travel and camp, but it was still something to hear. It was a glimpse at a man who was more than just blood and fury. 

Nicolo still hadn't divined where they were going, other than it seemed _away._ He tried to pay attention when Yusuf spoke, tried to pay attention to everything that the man did and his image of him began to solidify when one night he made his clearest attempt at communication.

Sitting at the other side of the fire, he brought his hand over his chest and said clearly, enunciating each syllable, "Yusuf al-Kaysani."

There was a long stretch of silence and then Nicolo said into the cooling air, "Nicolo di Genova."

*

For a long time, Yusuf rode the old black mare, who had one cloudy eye, but sure feet. A day came and perhaps it was a year, really, they all seem to slink by, piling up somewhere like dunes, where she simply couldn’t manage the demands of their life anymore and Yusuf traded her in the next village to a young man for several bags of grain, five pounds of rice, a half pound of dried dates, and one chicken.

It was foolish to become attached. Yusuf had had two mounts cut down from underneath him during the siege, he had heard their screams, saw their blood run into the red dirt and mingle with his own. But his heart clenched inside his chest when he handed her lead over to her new owner. It felt like another betrayal. Did she not carry him out of the burning city? Had she not brought him through the desert, through the searing heat of the day and watched through the night for danger? More than once, he had put his heels to her, to escape Nicolo's presence, like the sun burning into him.

A great wariness still separated them, even once contempt and outright hatred had been eroded by proximity. Sometimes it was enough though, after a long day’s riding, to simply unsaddle the horses and set up camp together.

One man would venture into the darkness to gather what he could for kindling and then start a low, crackling fire that would smoke throughout the night and seep into their skin, hair and clothes, laying on their skin for the next day to come. It was enough to watch each other through the haze of smoke and fire and contemplate this other soul, who seemed plucked from the farthest edges of each other’s known world and delivered to them on the most unforgiving of stages.

Their bedrolls migrated closer. Until their elbows bumped together in the night when one or the other twisted and turned in the grasp of some dream. Their horses would be large blocks of darkness, shifting on their feet occasionally, hocks up turned in sleep of their own. 

When Yusuf turned his back, shouldering the bags of grain, the frazzled chicken tucked under one arm and the other loaded down with a cloth bag bulging with the rice and dates, he heard the black mare wicker softly.

*

In times of need, they traded or sold their mounts and went by foot, better to walk and have food, then starve on horseback. They each had horses cut down from underneath them in ambushes, in the small skirmishes that they became involved in. There was a span of years after the fall of Jerusalem where it seemed like neither of them were ever the right color or religion for the place that they found themselves.

Through mutual agreement and need, they scratched out a living as everything from mercenaries to translators. Yusuf couldn't seem to bare to stay in the same place and he always seemed to be tugged away from where he really wanted to go. Cairo loomed in his mind as largely as the question of their immortality. Just when he resolved himself to see his family, to see if they still lived, if they still believed that _he_ lived, something would happen. The baggage train they were guarding would be attacked by bandits. An elderly man's only daughter would be kidnapped and they would have to rescue her. Nicolo _would_ be kidnapped and have to be rescued. Someone would see one or both of them rise from certain death and they would have to ride very, very far away until their faces did not match the tales that spread to entire cities.

It wouldn't matter if only his family had the same benefit of time that he did. On the long nights, when he couldn't look at Nicolo and not see the faces of people that should have lived much longer than they did, he would do the math in his head and think how old his mother was now. How old his youngest brother was. Think about rather or not his father was still exporting cloth and trading jokes over afternoon tea.

He had seen his own face in a mirror only recently. It was as unchanged as when he had left for Jerusalem. He saw Nicolo's face nearly every day. It had softened somehow, but there wasn't a line more than the first time that he had died with his nose pressed against Nicolo's cheek, listening to the last breath exit his enemy's lungs.

Under the open sky, in boarding houses, and in Bedouin tents, Yusuf had listened to him breathe at night and wondered at how he had become so familiar. Violence still pervaded their lives, but in the years that they had traveled together, Yusuf had learned a different intimacy than combat's. Instead of what Nicolo looked like when he was about to sink a blade between the gaps in someone's armor, he had learned what Nicolo looked like trying to shave by only his reflection in a murky bowl of water. How he could burn red as a pomegrante if he went without his face covered from the sun. How he spoke Arabic with a careful, lilting tone and would patiently practice his script whenever they had paper and ink, watching Yusuf's brush and repeating the same curves, the same lines again and again until he received Yusuf's approving nod.

It wasn't an easy intimacy at times. Simply explaining the association between a Christian and Muslim was often pressing, but then there was the matter of what Nicolo looked liked bathing. Yusuf had heard him leave camp, but dismissed it. Nicolo often liked to walk the perimeter of any camp they set up before evening fell. The canteens had needed filled and the river was only a short distance away, so Yusuf gathered them up and headed out. 

What he found first was Nicolo's stained tunic piled by a rock propping up his sword belt. A bar of soap rested with them, a small example of Yusuf's influence and his many diatribes on the unhygienic ways of heathens such as Christian soldiers.

What Yusuf saw wading out of the river simply wasn't fair. He was completely naked-of course. And of course he had seen him naked before. Hadn't he? As Yusuf stood with the canteens swaying from the cords wrapped around his hands, he couldn't think of a time that he really had seen Nicolo completely naked. Of course, he'd seen him dressing, or washing the blood from his throat, tunic pooled around his waist after a battle. Seen him pour water over his head and watched it trickle down his back and shoulders.

As it was now. Nicolo must have found a deep spot in the river where the current slowed. He'd been chest deep and he waded out calmy, the water breaking around him and his tanned arms. They had found out that in the particular logic of their curse, that tanning was not considered an injury. It didn't heal or dissipate. Years in the desert had baked Nicolo to as deep of a tan as he would ever possess. But the sun had not found it's way to all of him. Below the span of his shoulders, right in the dip of his throat, his skin was still pale.

The sudden and inexplicable urge to place his mouth there was so strong that the canteens dropped right from Yusuf's hands.

"Fuck."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> looking for a beta if anybody is interested! =) hope yall enjoy

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fanfic since I probably about 12! but these two have just so thoroughly captured my imagination and my heart. talk about the embodiment of romance and what better vehicle to explore the various conflicts and questions of histories but through these guys. hold for further chapters, I just needed to get something to get the rest going!


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